The DSA Welcomes Cynthia Cidre
Executive producer, creator, and writer of the "Dallas" reboot for TNT
Friday, January 6 at 7:00 PM - KD College Dallas
Members are FREE, Non-members Pay $10 at the Door
Cynthia Cidre is the creator and executive producer of the new TNT series, Dallas, featuring the next generation from the popular series that aired from 1978-1991 on CBS. Additionally Cidre created and wrote episodes of the television series Cane as well as made for television movies, such as Danny Fricke, Killing in a Small Town, I Saw What You Did, and Baby Will Fall. Film credits include Tara Road, Mambo Kings, Fires Within, and In Country. She received the Edgar Award (named for Edgar Allen Poe) and was nominated for a primetime Emmy Award for Killing in a Small Town.
Cidre began her career after winning a screenwriting competition she didn’t even enter. While on her way to a PhD in Victorian Literature at the University of Miami, she took a screenwriting class to avoid taking speech. Her professor submitted her screenplay – the first she had ever written – to the competition.
The award included a stipend from Columbia Pictures to go to Los Angeles and write a feature script. Thus, an academic career fell by the wayside as Hollywood beckoned. The screenplay she wrote for Columbia became the 1991 MGM feature Fires Within, starring Jimmy Smits, who would later star in Cane. Both projects are about Cuban Americans, a culture the Cuban-born Cidre knows well, having grown up in Miami’s Little Havana. She was in the fourth grade when her parents emigrated to Miami from Cuba in 1967 on board one of the “freedom flights” for political refugees fleeing Fidel Castro's communist regime.